Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon attack, phoned his mother in Russia to say, “I am absolutely fine. My wounds are healing. Everything is in God’s hands.”

“Be patient. Everything will be fine,” Zubeidat Tsarnaeva quoted her son as saying during their first phone call since his arrest.

The mother became notorious last month when she claimed during a bizarre press conference that the marathon deaths were faked by actors using paint to look like blood and that her sons, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, had been set up.

She said she was overcome during the six-minute talk with her son.

“I couldn’t stop myself from crying,” she said. “Mentally, he is normal, but the child is shocked,” she told Bloomberg News in Makhachkala, Russia, where she has lived since leaving the United States in 2011.

“It was really hard to hear him and for him to hear me. The conversation was very quiet,” she added. “It was my child, I know he is locked up like a dog, like an animal.”

She said she was promised she would get one call a month from her son.